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Comment by glofish | Hacker News Reader

From what I understand this exact same argument is reiterated every decade. "It worked in the past but today is different" - invariably ending up with a suggestion to give up increasingly large amounts of your profits to someone that "manages your investments" for you. I would do it if the fees were fixed, once someone asks for a "percent" I call BS. There is no difference between managing 100K and 1M yet you pay 10 times more.

I'll stick with Vanguard.

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It worked in the past but today is different is a vast oversimplification of my argument, and implying I'm either acting in bad faith or hoodwinked by those that are in order to pay off some investment manager is just an attempt to destroy the messenger.

Good luck with Vanguard.

My point is that while Wall Street may have figured out index funds better than it used to - it is nowhere near as "figured" out as that of manipulating individual stocks.

As the paper points out - holding individual stocks is far riskier and inefficient than that of holding an index stock. Hence my point that while you may have different motivations for writing your piece - in the end, you are advocating for a worse potential outcome for most people.

Wall Street would love nothing better than have many people play the stockmarket and try to outsmart the index funds.

Vanguard charges 10x for investing 10x more.

Good point - they do indeed!

What I was really referring to is someone else doing nothing more than buying a Vanguard ETF and then adding their fees (perhaps an order of magnitude higher) on top of those fees - just to "manage" your money.

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